Scholar: Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (1)

Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Harvard, 1981)

In chapter 2, "The Early Period," Hanan proposes to ask about three things: the origins of the "stuff-material" of the stories, the medium in which they were intended, and what we can learn of the author. However, his initial set of readings, on three examples of "early" stories found in the Feng Menglong collections, are much more useful as tools to the basic analysis of the stories. We learn about scene sequences, and how early stories could skip the prologue that was inevitable later on. We learn to look for breaks in the narrative. We learn about "set pieces," such as descriptions of female characters' beauty and talents. We learn to examine the narrator comments, how the narrator seems more detached in early stories. We learn that the authors of the stories (in all likelihood members of the merchant class just like their characters) like to please us, mystify us, and to show off -- hence, for example, the "poem chais" of the early stories, which later died away because they are so ostentatiously secondary to the plot. "The Jade Kuanyin" (TY 8) has a good example of a poem chain.